Jim Yackel - Agape

Reviewed by Doug Holland

Jim Yackel is a New York-based singer/songwriter. Playing the club scene and recording through the 1980s and '90s, Yackel came to faith in 2000. This guitar-and-rhythm-led CD (10 tracks, 34 minutes) represents his first recording since then and is a collection of self-penned praise, worship and personal testimony songs. Yackel and his engineer Andy Rudy are responsible for all instrumentation and vocals heard, with Yackel leading. His voice is rugged and good enough, but on occasions struggles to cope with some of the high notes. The songsmith's self-confessed admiration of The Beatles is strongly evident in the construction of many of the tracks and in the guitar lines he plays, but there is a tendency to over-complicate some of the songs with too many sections. The lyrics he writes are straightforward and convey simply the essential elements of the Christian faith without unpacking any of the ideas to any significant extent. The strongest track is "Pray Hard", a gentle encouragement to prayer that contains some delightful harmonies and is very reminiscent of The Beatles' "This Boy". With more subtlety and variation in his material Yackel could produce a top rate CD.